Representation Theory Current Affairs

Canadian mathematician Robert P. Langlands (81) has won prestigious Abel Prize 2018 for his visionary programme connecting representation theory to number theory. He will receive the award from Norway’s King Harald V at an award ceremony in Oslo in May 2018.

Robert Phelan Langlands

He was born on October 6, 1936 at New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada. He is best known as founder of Langlands program, a vast web of conjectures and results connecting representation theory and automorphic forms to study of Galois groups in number theory. He is emeritus professor and occupies Albert Einstein’s office at Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Abel Prize

It is awarded annually by Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters to one or more outstanding mathematicians. The award was established by Government of Norway in 2001 and awarded annually since 2003. It is named after 19th century Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel. It is one of world’s top prizes in mathematics and is considered to be maths equivalent of Nobel Prize, which has no prize for mathematics.

It carries monetary award of 6 million Norwegian kroner (NOK) (around 600,000 Euros). Indian American mathematician R. Srinivasa Varadhan was bestowed with this award in 2007 for his fundamental contributions to probability theory and for creating a unified theory of large deviation.